There are things that one just doesn’t think about. Things that are too fundamental, common sense, or oblique to warrant inquiry. For example, a phenomenon as vague and omnipresent as “change.” An earnest individual might come up to you and start throwing thought experiments at you. Suppose you don’t extract yourself from the situation. Suppose they start talking about the philosophical problem of a ship that, over time, has had all of its parts replaced in the course of renovations and repairs. Is it still the same ship? They want to know. They think that they are clever because there isn’t a yes or no answer. It’s the same ship, but it isn’t, but it is. The ship is the same but different. Almost mind blowing, raising problems of identity and continuity from the angle of a rational/empirical search for discrete units. Looking at only Symbolic entities, “ship,” “piece of ship,” etc, and logically connected Symbolic actions, “replacement of piece of ship,” etc, it is a cartoon problem with a cartoon solution.

In order to account for weird things like identity and continuity Aristotle developed a tri-part structure, the primal triad, consisting of the two poles of an opposing relation, and a material substratum shared between them (This is in Book 1 of Aristotle’s Natural Science). So in the case of the ship, the problem of continuity is solved. In the thought experiment, there is ship and not-the-same ship and they are set up as opposing each other. The ship can become not-the-same ship because of an underlying material that is constant, the wood or what have you. It is possible for a thing to change form because its material remains constant. So for Aristotle continuity can be established without reference to something like an in-between ship, a purely Symbolic placeholder.

However, this doesn’t directly address the problem of if the ship is actually different after all its replacements. Does the ship really have two different identities, and how does it move between identities? Enter Hegel. Hegel also developed a tri-part structure, a movement from thesis to anti-thesis to synthesis that is supposed to account for the self-becoming of scientific truth and knowledge. The process works by way of sublation, the thesis is sublated by the anti-thesis. The thesis is absorbed and mutated, but not forgotten, by the anti-thesis. It is precisely this development, and the recognition of the development, that Hegel regards as the synthesized truth (This is in Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit). This is why historical consciousness is so key for Hegel, the past is revealed in the present and the present will be revealed in the future; delayed cognition. As Zizek notes, the synthesis is really the thesis as seen through the lens of the anti-thesis.

So the identity of the ship is a synthesis. It is neither the ship (thesis), nor the not-the-same ship (anti-thesis), but the ship that has become a different ship. The Hegelian view is the precursor to existentialism, and finds identity in its becoming. A thing’s identity is not static but contains both what the thing has been and what it will be, the historical perspective. And now we have what Zizek calls a dialectical materialism, an account of how matter and concrete events give rise to phenomenon like zeitgeist and arête, where a group of people becomes “a people” or a subject “becomes what they are.” The ship that could and did.

Dialectical materialism brings to the fore the dimension of the Real. This is Merleau-Ponty’ notion of the <i>tertium quid</i>, the “third thing” in relation to a purely rationalistic perspective, wherein truth is a mathematically deduced eternal axiom, and a purely empirical perspective, wherein truth is an inductive agglomeration of data. The tertium quid for Merleau-Ponty is the body, the source of lived experience and interactive muscle memory. The body is inherently a medium between self and world, and it demonstrates the intersection between self and world qua embodied and historical process. This dispels New Age notions of Astral Travel and ill-defined “consciousness,” as well as Technofuturist notions of memory implants and hyper-advanced AI. If for Foucault the soul is the prison of the body, for Merleau-Ponty the soul is the essence of the body. There is some ‘kernel’ some traumatic Thing, that subjectivity both lives and cannot grasp. We live through it but cannot catch it, this <i>tertium quid.</i>

Like this:

Related

Would you say it’s possible that each race, when it situates itself in relation to the other two races, ‘understands’ itself as either thesis, anti-thesis, or synthesis? It seems like in order for any entity (race) in a triad to claim superiority — or even just a basic sense of purpose needed to stay motivated to pursue its aims as a ‘worthy’ adversary against the other two — it would have to view itself as the ‘synthesis’ of the other two entities.

In other words, if ‘thesis’ is just an immature (lesser) predecessor to anti-thesis, and anti-thesis is just an immature predecessor to synthesis, then the only way for the three to be ‘balanced’ in relation to one another (assuming that by ‘balanced’ we mean equally powerful/capable) is for each to see itself as occupying the same, ‘best’ spot on the scale running from thesis to synthesis; otherwise, they could only be in a tiered/hierarchical relationship.

If that’s the case, then it must be that the triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis is a set of floating, abstract categories, with no particular positive content, such that each race could see itself as incorporating all the elements of the other two races, positing itself as the new, superior synthesis of what’s flawed with the other two. (I love how we’ve turned from Aristotle to Starcraft, though video games are certainly not my area of expertise). Does any of that make sense?

Have you thought about extending this to the Holy Trinity, Father/God/Holy Spirit?

As for the Merleau-Ponty tertium quid, I want to see how to elaborate this more. It seems to me that the ‘soul is the prison of the body’ because the body can’t ever reject symbolic identification, but that the ‘soul is the essence of the body’ in the sense that we move our body without objectively knowing what is going on… What I’m wondering is if the tertium quid, the body, could be the ‘objectively subjective’ thing at work without our even knowing it (see here: http://bit.ly/q6M4nl). If that’s the case — and I’m still trying to understand these concepts — then perhaps the body actually is *not* the unconscious, but, rather, the body’s motion is the material manifestation of the subject’s *fundamental fantasy*?

The reason that the move to Starcraft is truly a knights move in thinking is because, honestly, I do not see a Hegelian triad at work in the relations between the races. What drew me to this path of thinking was more the idea at a tri-part relation is alive in a way that a dual-part relation is not.

If there were only 2 races (and really we should be talking about US race relations), the game would not have been able to evolve, the two sides would become either the mirror or the inverse of each other, condemned to a static and polarized relation. Think about Pepsi and Coke, or our current political constellation.

In a dyadic relation, we are presented with a binary Either/Or that is complete unto itself, a psychotic fusion. In a triadic relation, we are presented with a mediator, a middle term. This is high school English class in action, the notion that there is a grey area between good and evil, and that this grey area is indispensable.

Perhaps just as “civil society” is an indispensable mediator between people and state.

I am also thinking of the psychoanalytic “paternal signifier,” the signifier that breaks the psychotic fusion experience by introducing an Other. Correct me if I’m going wrong here, like everybody except for Zizek (it seems) I find psychoanalytic terminology slippery.

To return to Merleau-Ponty, I want to say that by “the soul is the essence of the body” I mean that Imaginary and Symbolic identification IS the body, in the following sense. The body does not exist as either a Symbolic cell, the imprint of cultural codes (gender roles etc.) nor as a pure Thing, a self-sufficient kernel of the Real. The body is an inhabited space in between those two, a third term that enables a language of movement and form, the lived body that is neither flatly objective nor arbitrarily subjective.

Also I’m obsessed with the number 3, though I don’t think it has any mystic properties, in unprecise (non-Kantian) terms, it’s a beautiful number.

Wow, right on! I was forgetting that the third term is so fundamental to psychoanalysis as well, so that’s now helping me realize the very real import of the ‘mediator,’ objet a or not. Believe me, I’m right there with you. The purpose of fantasy, its contours and indexes, how we are to read it, how we find it, how we manipulate it, etc… of course these are the important questions.

Yes, ‘slippery’ is certainly a good word for it. Makes things fun but confusing. But worse, it makes the discipline more vague and less accessible to people who really might benefit from it. Though I guess that goes for philosophy as well

And I agree, this discussion should def. extend to actual race relations.

I think we might actually be in agreement about the place of the body. I didn’t mean to say that the body was unconscious, just that it was potentially the site of the fundamental fantasy, without which we have the dissolution of the subject; without the mediation of the body between self and world, self and world collapse into one, which is why I’d see the body as akin to object a — without its mediation, we get psychosis.

I know, you’re right. But I’m not saying that there are things that can’t be known, but, rather, that there are things we cannot know about ourselves from our own point of view; we have to have a friend, or a trained analyst, expose the fundamental fantasy, since without that, we don’t truly know what it is that we do but do not recognize we do.

As it happens, I find Laclau to be a wonderful resource for reminding oneself of the distinguishing features of philosophical praxis — he brings to life the study of various topics at the level of logical operators and operations, where others don’t get abstract enough. But it’s about time I read some Aristotle!